Search Federation

November 5, 2009

One of the new lesser publicized features in Windows 7 is called Search Federation. If a website uses the OpenSearch standards you can create an XML file and save it as a .OSDX file so that Windows will recognize it.

Search federation for example allows you to search Wikipedia from within Windows Explorer. There are several connectors already available, you can find them at the bottom of this article. One thing to note is even if a site doesn’t use open search, you can search it using live search.